Links, 12.13.10

After a brief but profound post-Thanksgiving silence, people are writing and talking like the dickens again. (It’s the holidays. Had to get Dickens in there somewhere.) Links traffic has picked up accordingly.

Truth, at last: A fascinating and profoundly ironic article details how Nobel-laureate British geneticist Sir Paul Nurse discovered, quite by accident, a long-held family secret: The woman he knew as his sister was actually his mother. Sir Paul’s family story is a sadly familiar one — an unmarried girl pregnant and a family determined to keep this hidden. His attitude on discovering the truth: “There was such a stigma attached to illegitimacy then, but thankfully my mother’s situation would never happen now. That’s why I speak about it – because I feel I owe it to her to remove the shame she was made to feel and put things right for her.”

Look it up: At You Are Where You Came From, I got a kick out of Katie O’s post about the somewhat bewildering search terms (including the words “ghost” and “tragedy”) that led to repeat hits on her blog. I never get cool search terms like that in my stats. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Read before you shop: James Tanner is doing a series on cameras and genealogy. The first installment is a typically lucid overview of which features can be expected at which price points, and why even the most expensive camera will not yield good results if you’re a lousy photographer. Excuse me while I go enroll in a photography class now.

Paperless publishing: At Life’s Journey, Bob Kramp discusses his experiments in using electronic digital readers as an alternative to paper in publishing his research.

Ready or not: It’s never too early to plan for a major conference, as Dick Eastman makes clear in his roundup of hotel options near the May 2011 NGS conference in North Charleston, SC. Some of the closest hotels are already sold out.

Blood of heroes: Oh, DNA research, you make my head spin. And you generate the most amusing letters to the editor sometimes. Like this one from the Irish Times, explaining why half the planet is descended from Brian Boru.

Single-minded: The Washington Post recently eulogized William Addams Reitwiesner, a devoted (obsessed?) researcher whose dissections of presidential forebears made many headlines. A vivid portrait of a person consumed by a “passion for facts,” in the words of one colleague.

Have a happy week. May your to-do list shrink and your pile of wrapped presents grow.

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One Comment on “Links, 12.13.10”

Thanks for the link! As far as I can remember, those are the first particularly interesting search terms to ever show up in my stats. That’s half the reason I was so excited by them. That, and the ghost 🙂